Tick Tock
by Regency
Summary: Someone has abducted Laura Roslin. She doesn't know who they are or what they want. She only knows what she hears: the tell-tale ticking of a clock. Set some time during Season Two, after "Home."


Gently the clock ticked somewhere above Laura Roslin's head. As the minutes wasted away, she slept a restless sleep, breathing shallowly all the while. She lie undisturbed until the insistent banging of time and responsibility roused her. Her eyes were speared with stinging rays of light and her mind was muddied by confusion. She was sitting on the floor of a room she didn't recognize on a ship she couldn't recall. And she was alone.

She gingerly touched her head, being careful of the constant throbbing within. She tried to stand but her legs melted beneath her and she collapsed onto herself, gasping for breath. Her chest ached with the effort. From her place, she looked around for some sign of anyone or anything familiar.

It was a sparsely-filled room; a low table in the corner farthest from her, a makeshift bed near there, and a lonely rocking chair by itself against the opposite wall. There were no windows or doors that she could see. There were no people.

The light that had blinded her upon waking faded so gradually that she hardly noticed its departure, but once it was gone, she felt infinitely more afraid. She couldn't walk and she certainly couldn't yell for help. Someone had seen fit to put her in this room and then left her here.

She leaned on her hands, using them to pull herself across the solid steel floor. It made no noise as she advanced. It was solid; wall to wall, she imagined. Painstakingly she made her way towards the bed, struggling because she didn't have to strength to hold herself upright and because she doubted her will to rise again should she fall.

Her fingers were aching and red once she finally collapsed onto the pad on her back. She let out a shallow breath, staring at the low ceiling, listening to the fainter tick-tock of her absent clock. From here, she could see the entire room. From here, she saw her little part of the cosmos.

She wanted to shout or yell and demand that someone answer to her, but who would? Who would come to her if they never heard her call?

"Hello," she spoke softly. The word reverberated perhaps a foot and dissipated, never having gone far. "Hello," she said again, louder and more determined. "Is there anyone here? Is there anyone listening?" _If so, who are you_, she thought to herself. _Who are you and what do you want from me? _No one answered, only the unbearable ticking of a clock she couldn't find.

"Hello," she said once more, this time to the clock. It was her only companion, whispering to her the passing of minutes and hours. _Hello._

_Tick Tock_, it replied monotone and unchanging.

Lying there, her legs for some misfortune, useless and her energy nonexistent, she fell asleep. When she woke, she found she had developed blisters on the pads of her fingers and palms, and that there was dry blood gathered under her fingernails. Her legs were still heavy but she could both feel and move them. She supposed that was good although there was nowhere to walk to or to run. She at last realized that during her sleep, someone had come to pull the ragged quilts up to her neck. She was shivering.

Like a dreadful accompaniment, the clock ticked, softer than before, but still it ticked. _Tick tock, Laura._ She welcomed it as an old friend. _Hello, clock._

She had no idea how long she'd slept. Her might partly renewed, she pushed herself up onto her elbows and surveyed her prison. It hadn't changed, though the light had returned; more muted and strangely kinder, but it was back.

On the table perhaps a meter from her head was a meager plate of food. There were s small bunch of red grapes and what she supposed were sliced Virgon peaches. Beside that was a dark tumbler decorated with beads of precipitation. Seeing it, her stomach clinched with a new hunger and a deeper yearning that she couldn't identify.

Her knees quivered as she rolled onto all fours and crawled laboriously toward the food. Her hands burned and her wrists screamed with the weight they were forced to bear. She pursed her lips to restrain her tears of deepening agony. Coming to the table, she leaned upon it and folded her legs beside her. She said a short prayer to her Gods and without a cautionary thought, devoured the grapes and peach slices, and drank down the Ambrosia, wasting not a drop. Once the plate was clean of every morsel of what would have to pass for her meal, she groaned with pain, because it was not enough. She was still famished. She was still helpless.

She could deal with power hungry politicians, because they were egotistical and she knew egos. She could deal with fanatics because they would take her presence as payment enough. What she couldn't deal with was this absence, this refusal to deal with her. They had just locked her away and thrown out the key.

Clothed strangely in her nightgown she crawled back to the cot and settled back beneath the covers. She felt like they could see her; she felt like she should hide. Her cheek pressed into her 'pillow' she smelt a familiar scent that pricked her flesh with a barb of optimism. The encompassing, clean, unwavering cologne of her Commander Adama. She pushed her nose into the folded cloth and felt her first tears descend.

All she'd thought of since she woke up an uncountable time ago was that she was being held, that no one would speak to her or acknowledge her. She had not so much as pondered the fate of her dear, dear friend. The last thing she remembered was walking beside him on _Cloud 9_. She could see his gift of a rare smile, she could sense his hand a hair's breath from the small of her back and feel him as honestly as if they'd been inside the same body. They and her guards were walking to the hangar bay for her departure to return to _Colonial One_. They hadn't said very much at all; the atmosphere was relaxed. All the words spoken were in their eyes and not on their lips. In a perfect world, it would not have been the words, but his lips on hers that said it all. But that night, like all those in the last five months, was not that of a perfect world nor a perfect existence. Only in keeping that in mind was she able to decline his offer of a night cap that evening.

That memory intact, she had to ask, _Where is Bill?_ She knew he'd give his life for her. He'd never spoken the vow aloud but it had been known from the moment that promise was born. He would die for her. Had he?

She shakily unfolded the blankets nestling his scent and found that burrowed within was his uniform jacket. The dark blue material was matted with lint and loose thread, but the clasps were so pristine she could see herself in them. She held it to her nose and then began to cry in earnest. She couldn't have been gone more than a day, but she had come to this. What would he think of her? If he could see her…If he was alive.

She believed strongly that were he alive, she wouldn't be in this predicament. Zeus would never allow Hera to be harmed, never. Together they stood, divided they fell. She held his coat to her chest and grieved. This singular hint, this present of a sort, was all she had. Did she have hope? Did she have a chance?

Without Zeus, they would eventually move forward, Baltar would take her place as Tigh would take Adama's and the Ragtag Fleet would continue on this path they'd begun together. Only without them.

Feeling sapped of her frail faith, she began to rock. Back in forth, her lips moving in silent recitation of moments that stood out in her mind. It was funny how she never forgot.

"We need to start having babies." Her lips turned up at the ends as she recalled his face.

Another scene. "He's bluffing." She scoffed. Then ate her words.

Later time, same catastrophe. "My father, he's been shot." Her chest burned painfully as he wasn't close enough to prove Lee wrong. She felt him dying.

"Everyday we live is a gift." From the Gods, she had returned. "No," he said. "From you." She'd wanted to reach out to him then; to cement their emotional reunion with a physical one, but she couldn't. They weren't alone then, the time wasn't right, and his eyes -- as nonjudgmental as they'd been -- forbade it. They would own another moment, they uttered in a language unknown to everyone but her, there would be another chance.

However, that chance had not come for them. During their successive battles, the occasion nor the courage had returned to them and, like her memory of life before the apocalypse, the urge faded until she was unsure if it had been there at all. Now she knew that it had been and that it was still there. And as achingly imperative as it was before.

All she had to appease her was this jacket with his scent embedded in it and the death rasp of her only confidante, her confessor, her only witness. It would tell her story when she was gone. And she knew she would be soon because if and when she was rescued from this solitary hell, her days were numbered. Bill had been the buffer between her and those who would see fit to unseat her. Without him, she only had Lee and Billy and as proud as she was of them, they couldn't stare down an entire fleet on their own. If she escaped, they'd kill her. If she stayed, madness and cancer would.

"I'll be dead soon," she offered.

_Tick-Tick-Tick-Tock,_ the clock intoned oddly.

That immediately struck her as unusual and she paused in her reminscing to listen again.

_Tick-Tick-Tick-Tock,_ it continued. It did not cease in its frank single-instrument recital. _Tick-tock-tick._ It returned to normal again, but she couldn't break her focus. Longer and Longer she listened, and over and over _Tick-Tick-Tick-Tock_ would come. And the more she listened, the less like the moving hands of a timepiece it sounded. It began as the sound of time passing. It blurred into the rhythm of a beating heart. One so known to her that she would have to already be dead not to recognize it. Finally, in one random instant that she would never know the number of, it burst mid-beat into an innocuous, harmless knock.

She searched for the sound, stopping for a second her own breath to hear it. _Where are you?_

_Knock knock_, came again. _I'm here,_ it seemed to say to her even as its din bounced around the sealed room to stymie her. _Knock knock, Laura._

She wet her lips and parted them to speak, only to stop short when her larynx seized up and her words were lost. Her only remaining link to humanity had been her ability to speak to herself and now that was gone. And with it went any chance of someone else hearing her.

'Help,' she mouthed without sound. One arm crushing the coat to her body and the other bracing her against the wall as she rose painfully, pins and needles pricking treacherously at her legs. 'Help!'. The words refused to come and she could sense a certain darkness seeping in with the light. That blackness wanted her and there was no way to escape it. Her savior ceased his incessant company. It was only her.

"Gods," she rasped unexpectedly. "Please." She backed away from the blackness and the burning stench it brought, tripping over the quilts until she was crouched up behind the wooden rocking chair. She grasped the whittled bars in her bloodless hands and stared through them at the fog of death coming at her. It was just like Caprica; just like it should've been.

Somewhere in the opaque fog ahead, mechanical noises filter through the space and she began to tremble. Not from cold but from fear. It was one thing to die alone, but entirely another to die at the hands of your enemy, knowing that it meant nothing to them. Thinking of that, she couldn't give even their computerized counterpoints the knowledge that she had looked into their eyes. They didn't deserve even that and she deserved more. She squeezed her eyes shut in mercy and in prayer and never let go of the solemn rocking chair.

The culmination of all the noise she'd heard was an enormous *slam!* as the newly created door fell to the floor. She exhaled sharply but ceased all signs of fear. They could kill only her body, not her good deeds and not those who would follow. She would live in them. And, on a high note, she would see Bill again. That was the best thing.

She held onto that notion as silence prevailed for several moments. Beyond the blood pumping past her ears, she didn't hear the tightly-controlled march towards her by one man. He kneeled in front of the chair, tenderly covering her fists with his larger hands.

She kept her eyes shut, not daring to hope that the hands on top of hers where those she hoped they were. She shook her head, more to herself than him, "No. No. He's gone. He's gone."

He gently tugged her hands. "I'm here." Her throat caught at hearing his voice. "Come around. Look at me. I'm here." She opened her eyes slightly and saw him through the slats. She wanted so much for it to be him.

Not seeing or caring to see anyone else who might've been in the room, she stood up. She released his hands and walked about the chair to look at him. She towered over him as he kneeled on the floor. "I don't know how long I've been here."

"Seven days."

"I didn't speak to anyone."

"I know."

"I was alone."

"You were never alone. I was with you."

She didn't hear him. "All I heard was this clock ticking and ticking and ticking. And it was all I heard and it was the only one here with me. No one would tell me what I'd done."

"You didn't do anything."

"And I--I thought you were dead. I thought you'd been killed trying to protect me. I couldn't forgive myself." She closed her eyes and sighed, wearing a mantle of frailty new to her. "What a ridiculous notion."

He reached up and gripped her hand in his. "Not nearly as ridiculous as you think. In fact, it's entirely true."

She looked down to him with heavy eyes. "Entirely?"

"Without reservation or whisper of doubt." He brought her hand discreetly to his lips. They did have an audience.

"Thank you."

"Thank _you,_" he returned.

Her blood's adrenaline began to wane and her frailty came back with a vengeance. She toppled forward suddenly, her balance completely abandoning her, and Bill was forced to catch her in the most awkward of positions. He wrapped his arms around her waist and supported her when her legs folded under her.

She grabbed for his shoulders, her breath arriving in short bursts of energy that came and went, but for now was mostly going. She slid gracelessly down his body until she collapsed against his chest. Her legs no longer took orders from her and her arms felt unbearably weak. Sickness she could live with, but this unnamed weakness might be the end of her.

"You'll be all right," he whispered against her ear. "You'll be fine."

She didn't know what had happened or how she'd gotten here, but she knew, by the gods, she was finally leaving. And to the tune of the finest clock, she let down her guard.

_Tick tock_, she heard when _Bad-dum _went his heart.


End file.
